War and Love – immigration into the Nordic countries

Immigrants from Sri Lanka living at Lofoten islands, Norway.

By Hasse Persson, Curator Hasselblad Center.

This unique documentary project by the famous Danish photographer Henrik Saxgren about immigration to Northern Europe will open at Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg, Sweden, in January 2006. The opening of WAR & LOVE will coincide with the onset of the Multi-cultural Year 2006, which Sweden has declared. The exhibition will be on tour throughout Scandinavia for the next two years.As the title indicates war and love are two main reasons for people to look for a better life in Northern Europe. First and foremost is the fact that most immigrants are victims of war; internal conflicts as well as wars between countries. Love is the other strong reason for wanting to move to Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, and such faraway places as Greenland and Iceland. In his research project on immigration, Henrik Saxgren has been investigating and photographing immigrants in all these countries. Using medium size cameras he spent four years on the road to complete this photographic documentary. A project financed by Hasselblad Foundation, Nordic Culture Fund and Velux Foundation.WAR & LOVE is probably the largest photographic project about the millions of people, who have ruptured their ties with their native lands in search of a better life, since Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado´s documentation MIGRATION, which was exhibited and published in the year 2000. Saxgren, however, starts where Salgado stops. Where the long journey into the unknown has come to an end, Henrik Saxgren in his pictures portrays the true immigrant.In his work Saxgren has identified around 110 different ethnic groups of people who have immigrated into the North of Europe. Out of these groups individuals, couples and families have been randomly picked to be photographed and interviewed by Henrik Saxgren in their homes and workplaces. Obviously posing, Saxgren´s immigrants look into the camera in their new environment. An environment that, in most cases, reveals their origin in an often touching way. You are moved by the welcoming looks on their faces, a look as if to invite you, the onlooker, into their new homes. A gesture that, hopefully, will have a positive influence on the viewer. Maybe aid Scandinavians with professed difficulties in making acquaintances with immigrants. Immigrants that in big cities like Stockholm today comprise some 25 % of the population.To illuminate the sometimes bleak life in the Scandinavian countries, Saxgren – it seems to me – intentionally holds back the colours in his well lit photographs of the new members of society. As a contrast he works in vivid colours when showing large panorama views of different assembly camps, where immigrants are placed, and often spend years waiting, by police, bureaucrats and social workers, while the question whether or not they have a right to receive a residence permit is pondered.The obvious comparison to Henrik Saxgren´s project, besides Salgado´s subject matter migration, is, of course, the German photographer August Sander´s (1876-1964) monumental project portraying the German population between the First and the Second World War. In 1929 Sander published Faces of the Times (Anlitz der Zeit), a book of sixty portraits, which has since become a classic in the literature of European photography. Before his camera Sander assembled individuals from all walks of life – farmers, clergymen, painters, bureacrats, gypsies, nuns, clerks and, last, unemployed and mentally ill people.- From the very beginning I was most inspired by August Sander, Saxgren discloses. I admired his toned down subjectivity and almost scientific seriousness. Which makes it possible that I still today can find new information in his photographs. My concept from the very beginning was to have the same objectivity in the framing and lighting in my photographs that Sander and his German colleagues had in their spirit of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in the 1920´s, writes Henrik Saxgren in the afterword to his new book.It is fair to say that Henrik Saxgren´s new project about immigration will have an enormous impact on the way we look at these new Scandinavians, These new Scandinavians who, no doubt, will have a hard road to travel before being fully accepted and assimilated into the Scandinavian societies. Hopefully, reluctant Danes, Finns, Norweigians and Swedes – by looking at the photographs of these new groups at their own pace at Hasselblad center, and reading about them in the new book WAR & LOVE – will open up and welcome these new Scandinavian into their hearts and minds. If Henrik Saxgren´s photographs and texts will help to bridge the gap between them and us, his project will be remembered for generations to come. HP